Page 1 of The Botanist's Assistant
1
Three Hundred Seconds
Margaret Finch inserts her keyinto the lock, opens the lab door and inhales the faint scent of science at work: the sharp tang of acetone, the fermented-fruit smell of ethanol, the gas-station odor of petroleum ether. A new vent hood would take care of much of the smell, but until the new grant comes in, there’s no money for it.
She flips on the bright overhead lights and smiles at the sight of the shiny linoleum floors, the neat benches, the rows of sparkling glass beakers and flasks, the orderly shelves of nitrile gloves and safety goggles. She raises her gaze, and that’s the moment Margaret’s smile shifts into a frown.
According to the clock on the back wall, it’s seven fifty a.m. If Margaret didn’t hold such tight control of herself, she would have gasped. She is never late and yet, today, she is a full three hundred seconds behind schedule.
For a moment, Margaret doesn’t move as she reverse engineers the morning: the forty-five-minute drive to the lab from her little cottage on the hill (smooth sailing), ninety seconds of gathering her purse and starting her truck (yes), fourminutesof teeth brushing and hair combing (certainly no lost seconds there), five minutes to pack her usual lunch—two hard-boiled eggs, a small square of cheddar cheese and a sliced apple—(check), half an hour of preparing and eating her morning oatmeal plus five minutes to wash the dishes she generated (OK), seven minutes to brew and fill her thermos with coffee (no variable in the machine) and ten minutes to get out of bed, wash her face and get dressed (wait!).
Hadn’t she had to hunt this morning for her rosebud-and-wren-print shirt, which wasn’t in its usual place on the ladder-back chair by her bed? Hadn’t she had to check the closet where it was also missing and then rerun her actions from the previous evening before she located the cotton blouse still draped over the ironing board in her cramped laundry room?
Margaret had dressed hurriedly, buttoning the rosebud blouse, zipping up her calf-length brown skirt, yanking on her socks and her sturdy leather boots, but there had been no making up for those lost minutes.
What had caused her to be so careless, so forgetful?
A slight breeze shakes the knobcone pine branches outside the lab windows, prompting Margaret to realize that she, too, needs to move and that trying to figure out the cause of her breakdown is simply wasting more time. She hustles into the lab, shrugs into her lab coat and settles herself at the computer.
There is work to be done.
Like almost everything else in the lab, the computer system is old and requires several tries to connect to the right Wi-Fi network. First it tries to send her to the library, then to some network named IPfreely. Margaret sighs. Businessmajor, male, she guesses. She’s supposed to report things like this, although the way the wheels of the college grind, the offender will have graduated and gotten work at some high-paying corporate job before anything is done. She waits again as the ancient machine decides she wants the cafeteria across campus.
“Biological Sciences,” she commands before the computer finally allows her to link to the right spot.
She looks at her watch. Another two wasted minutes. At this rate she’ll be eating her lunch at twelve fifteen instead of noon.
If there’s one thing Margaret doesn’t like, it’s waste. There’s just so much of it in the world: mounds of food tossed in landfills, rivers of water hissing from sprinklers across golf courses and rich people’s lawns, clothes tossed out after one season of wearing. Squandering finite resources like water, land—and time—is what people who don’t pay attention do. Margaret always pays attention. It’s who she is. She has managed, for instance, to wear her brown leather boots for the past eleven years, thanks to meticulous maintenance and regular resoling.
Margaret gives a tiny shake of her head to settle her brain back to her task and calls up her data file, noticing that today is March 12 and, with the slightest prick of shock, that tomorrow is her birthday and she will turn fifty-four. Not an age that needs to be celebrated. Not that anyone will.
Usually Beth Purdy, assistant to the dean of biological sciences, will mark the birthdays of faculty and staff with a delivery to the breakroom of a supermarket cake emblazoned with a genericHappy Birthday!Margaret, however, is notexpecting a cake, not after she suggested to Purdy two weeks ago that some might see her messy desk as evidence of a cluttered mind and emailed her the link to an article titled “Five Signs You Might Be Sabotaging Your Own Success.”
Margaret was only trying to help; however, as often happens, her good intention somehow landed with a thud.
Yet, unbeknownst to Margaret as she sits at her computer, her fifty-fourth birthday will be marked. Not by a cake or even the salmon-and-roasted-potato dinner she decided to cook for herself but by an unexpected and very upsetting death.
2
A Word to the Unwise
Margaret has already put ina good half hour of work on the computer when the lab door opens and a hacking cough announces the arrival of Calvin Hollowell, the lab’s postdoc.
Why the man insists on smoking is a puzzle to Margaret. As a scientist, he should know the dangers of sucking clouds of benzene, arsenic and formaldehyde into his lungs. And yet, he persists.
Hollowell is freckled and round-bodied with a shock of rusty red hair that pokes in every direction like a startled porcupine. What people notice most about him, however, is not his freckles nor the wildness of his hair but the anxiousness that radiates out from him. He practically vibrates with it. Tell Calvin he’d won a million dollars, and he would spend the next 365 days worrying either that someone was going to con him out of his winnings or that he’d buy something he’d later regret, and the money would languish in some savings account, never to be spent.
Margaret believes DNA may have dealt Calvin that roughhand. (Didn’t he always say what a fussy and colicky baby he was?) She suspects, however, the trait has been made worse by the fact that Calvin is on his third postdoc position and, as even he can see by now, the world of academia is slowly but irrevocably closing its doors on him.
“Morning, Margaret,” Calvin says with a sigh so loud and high-pitched that whales in the nearby bay might hear it.
“Is everything all right?” Margaret asks, knowing it is not. The world is hardly ever all right with him.
Calvin shakes his head. “Apparently my neighbor complained that his parrot has developed asthma because of the secondhand smoke from my apartment, so now my landlord says the only place I can smoke is across the street near the dog park, and you know how I distrust dogs.”
Margaret does. Earlier this year, Calvin read an article about a millionaire who’d left her entire fortune to her cat instead of her children and is now convinced that his parents’ new toy poodle, Anthony, is attempting to cut him from his parents’ will. The dog, he claims, growls and nips at his ankles whenever they are out of the room, then acts the perfect saint the minute they return so that when he complains to his mother that the dog is an “evil pest,” she sniffs, “At least Anthony shows us affection, unlike some people I know.”
“He’ll probably inherit everything,” is what Calvin says.
